When people ask me what kind of music I listen to these days, I would rather tell them David Mamet then any of the artificial and horrendous tunes being played eight times a minute on radio stations. Naturally, Mamet isn’t a musician in the popular sense of the profession, but popping one of his movies into my DVD player is literally poetry in motion. Words strung together for more than four minutes at a time, formulated and performed to such a rhythm that its impossible not to snap your fingers while listening to them. His last film, State and Main, made my top ten list and while Heist doesn’t exactly rank alongside classics like House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner, it certainly has a beat that you can dance to.

The common trappings of the majority of Mamet’s characters are either criminals or regular Joes looking to make that one great big score. “The leads” and “the process” were just Hitchcockian Macguffins to set the plot in motion, but the crew here is after something we can all see and wish only someday to touch – gold. Jim Moore (Gene Hackman) is the atypical crew leader, looking at one final snatch before heading off to retirement with his younger, but dedicated wife Fran (Rebecca Pidgeon). The rest of his loyal coterie includes Bobby Blane (Delroy Lindo), always looking out for Jim’s back and Don "Pinky" Pincus (Mamet regular, the great Ricky Jay).

When their latest job goes awry, Jim’s fence Bergman (Danny DeVito), cheats them out of a portion of their cut and offers them a new one, hijacking an incoming shipment of the aforementioned valuable metal. Bergman insists that his nephew, Jimmy Silk (Sam Rockwell), be in on this one to protect his interests against Jim’s objections and that’s just the beginning of their problems.

Heist is a difficult film to discuss at length since there’s so little you can discuss without spoiling much of the fun. Yes, that means plot twists and doublecrosses and triplecrosses on those doublecrosses. Mamet isn’t shy when it comes to fooling the audience, even when multiple viewings show how impossible some of those ruses are. Mamet, however, keeps the action moving fast enough for us to be looking for what’s coming next and not what just came.

The centerpiece heist of the film unfolds mostly before our very eyes without knowing all the meticulous planning that with into it as in this summer’s terrific caper flick, The Score. The performances are a uniform pleasure, all reveling the opportunity to let Mamet’s sentences and punchy one-liners escape their mouths. Its climax even reaches a boiling point that many may consider standard gunplay in an otherwise cerebral exercise, but it’s a great one and ultimately satisfies beyond expectation.

It would be easy to look at Heist and call it pretty “by-the-numbers” entertainment. How many times have we seen the “one last job” tale perpetrated with alternate realities and double helixes? Simply labeling anything “standard” by Mamet is about as shallow as an unhypnotized guy named Hal. Look through the plot to see this cast, hear the dialogue and observe how time-tested, sometimes overdone tales can be “re-imagined” (as the latest Hollywood term stipulates) with enough finesse to make it feel like new. As The Score makes it way to video shelves in December and you can’t wait four weeks for Ocean’s Eleven, then Heist is the movie to see.